Single Projects or One Project Containing all as Epics

Question

Good afternoon,

We are working on aligning project management and developer usage within Jira but can't agree on which is best:

- Dev Preference: One single project that includes all projects as epics in this project (in addition to the existing maintenance project. Reasons include:

* Consistent settings across all projects (working to address this now)
* Need to create releases for each separate project (researching ability to have cross project releases/need to only create one per release vs one per project per release)
* Board display (researching fixing so they can view by project/not just by Epic)

- PM Preference: Separate project for each project. Reasons include:

* ability focus on one project at a time and projects assigned to each PM
* ability designate PM, Dev and Business ownership
* ability to display all projects we're currently working on with timeline/priorities on the roadmap (we could do this with epics on the roadmap, but don't have time to migrate existing projects so for a while it would display standalone projects with others mixed into the other project as epics/easily lost since this is for senior leadership to have insight into what our team is currently working on)

Here are some examples of independent projects the Dev team would like to see all under one project that have different priorities, PMs and resources assigned:

* Independent system 1 migration
* Independent system 2 migration
* Independent system 3 migration
* Independent system 4 migration 
* Independent system 5 integration builds
* Independent system 6 enhancements/rebuild

Any advice on the best way to proceed will be greatly appreciated! We are specifically looking for pros and cons of each approach to help us come to mutually beneficial agreement. I'm leaning toward the separate project approach as a PM, but would like opinions on both options.

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

Nikki

Nikki Hylton · Answer

Thank you for your feedback, @Tobias H! One of the biggest struggles/hurdles for our devs wanting to work from one project is they often have one release that spans multiple projects, so currently they have to create a separate release for each project. If we merged them all into one, they could simply manage the one release. Any ideas on that?

The last driver I think we could live with but still looking for solutions on -

* Board display (researching fixing so they can view by project/not just by Epic)

Thanks again, truly appreciated,

Nikki

Tobias H · Answer

Hi Nikki!

We are currently working hard on getting our dev teams out of a joint massive project.
It probably had some upsides for the devs, but from an admin perspective one joint project causes too many headaches, such as:

* If you want to grant someone "Manage Sprint" for their teams scrum board, you will automatically grant them permission to manage sprints across the entire project.
* It's way to easy for someone with project admin to change a setting that will negatively affect other teams.
* Creating automations for one, or a few, team(s) adds extra complexity as you will have to create JQL queries to stop it from triggering all over the place.
* Same with filtering issues to the correct boards, you will have to include some custom field that captures which dev team is working on what, and manually update each filter to include this field.

You mention that using separate projects will cause issues with having the same settings across all of them, but you can circumvent this by using a template project when you create new projects.

That way you will make sure you use the same schemes for permissions, issues and workflows. The only thing you'll have to manually configure for each new project are the boards themselves.